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# Six Feet of Cheese
- URL: https://www.sigmundsays.software/six-feet-of-cheese/
- Published: 2026-06-17T19:28:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-25T19:28:37.000Z
- Author: Patrick Quinn

Six Feet of Cheese

We've had some big wins. Out of the more than 1,000 companies we've served, many of my favorites have been very small firms, sometimes even sole proprietors. And I'm keenly aware that the wins we got for the small fries were probably proportionately more valuable to them than the wins we got our big customers. (Affordable custom software development, better uptime for their small-but-mighty systems, etc.)

Many of the big wins for big companies have been exhilarating, too. But the most memorable projects were the ones that started small and got big. For example, the credit union that got acquired by a mega bank (in part because of the revenue-generating software we built for them). 

And sometimes, big wins came in the form of keeping systems online (which almost always means more revenue—downtime is expensive!). One time, we were onsite with a major retailer, whose critical systems were slow and crashing all the time. Very high stakes engagement—they established a "war room" (conference room), there were messages and alerts flying in all directions 24/7\. The CEO himself was intimately involved in the project. Etc. One morning, our co-founder gets an explosion of text messages at like 6am. "The system is down, and peak business hours are starting! 911! 911!" So Mike logs into a monitoring dashboard we'd created, and replies to the CEO—"What are you seeing? Who reported the system down?" 

Turns out, the system was fine. Purring like a kitten, really. Before we got there, their monitoring dashboards looked (and sounded!) like an EKG machine attached to someone having a heart attack. Chaos—nothing but systems that were stressed or down entirely. We'd tuned the systems so well (and fixed their broken monitoring setup; a common problem in high-traffic systems) that the monitoring dashboard now looked like a healthy, sleeping patient. The CEO had suffered from those heart attack dashboards for so long, he didn't even know what healthy looked like. 

I know you're waiting for the punch line to this post's title, so let's get into it. One of my all-time favorite projects started with a small grocery industry consulting firm out of Chicago. Here's the problem they solved: The grocery industry is brutally unforgiving. Grocery stores have NET margins of like 3% (if they're well-run, that is), and they turn over their inventory *dozens* of times per year. Profits come from optimized shelf space. For *all* of the products in the store. Here's the punch line: If you have 6 feet of cheese on the shelf, you're profitable. If you have 7, you lose money on cheese. If you have 5, you missed out on sales. 

The answer was in the data, but those answers were locked away in the crappy software that grocers used (along with banks, car dealers, and countless others we saw and fixed over the years). So our client extracted that data, made sense of it, and sold it back to the grocers. They started by burning spreadsheets on CDs and *mailing* them to customers! (Just like Netflix, before streaming; this was the 1990s after all.) Then they found us. We turned those spreadsheets into a beautiful SaaS product, had a great 10-year run, and then they got bought by major data analytics firm Inmar. 

We loved that project so much, we actually considered renaming the company Six Feet of Cheese. (Or starting a rock bank.) And Jackie, if you're reading this, you are missed! I hope you're doing well. Let's catch up again soon!

I am Sigmund. Thanks so much for listening.